James Harvey
02-07-2002, 08:56 AM
<a href="http://www.comicon.com/newsarama">Comic Newsarama</a> had a chance to talk to the new DC President Paul Levitz to discuss DC’s editorial structure as a result of these developments, how Levitz sees his new role and if DC readers will even notice a difference…
NEWSARAMA: Notable in today’s announcements was the part that said you wouldn’t be “replacing yourself”, but rather adding Jenette’s duties to your present job. How is that possible? Jenette was one person doing a full-time job, and as you’ve said in previous interviews, you’re one person doing more than a full-time job. Was there duplication there in the first place?
PAUL LEVITZ: No, we’d pretty much divvied things up over the years in a sensible fashion where we were very rarely in the same room at the same time for anything other than general staff meetings where we were all swapping notes. Clearly, I will have to be less hands-on with some of the things that I am doing now. And we’ve evolved some of our ways of doing business over the last batch of months, and we’ll continue to evolve them over the next batch of months. Some of it is mundane – there are things that I still sign and approve and review that certainly somebody else can do. I’ve become detail-oriented in some pretty ridiculous ways over the years. When they finally pried signing every editorial voucher out of my hands ten or fifteen years ago, I think they were using a cattle prod. So I’ll have to have some rationality about that. Some of it will just be an evolutionary change in the place. I’m not replacing my old gig because it really wasn’t a very typical job construction to start with. You very rarely have editorial and business sides of a publishing company coming together at the same desk, and it’s even more rare to have that coming together with the licensing and corporate stuff that I did. So probably, we’ll get a little more normal in some of those structures over time, and divvy it up a little more.
To read the whole interview, go <a href="http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=12&t=000125">HERE</a>!
NEWSARAMA: Notable in today’s announcements was the part that said you wouldn’t be “replacing yourself”, but rather adding Jenette’s duties to your present job. How is that possible? Jenette was one person doing a full-time job, and as you’ve said in previous interviews, you’re one person doing more than a full-time job. Was there duplication there in the first place?
PAUL LEVITZ: No, we’d pretty much divvied things up over the years in a sensible fashion where we were very rarely in the same room at the same time for anything other than general staff meetings where we were all swapping notes. Clearly, I will have to be less hands-on with some of the things that I am doing now. And we’ve evolved some of our ways of doing business over the last batch of months, and we’ll continue to evolve them over the next batch of months. Some of it is mundane – there are things that I still sign and approve and review that certainly somebody else can do. I’ve become detail-oriented in some pretty ridiculous ways over the years. When they finally pried signing every editorial voucher out of my hands ten or fifteen years ago, I think they were using a cattle prod. So I’ll have to have some rationality about that. Some of it will just be an evolutionary change in the place. I’m not replacing my old gig because it really wasn’t a very typical job construction to start with. You very rarely have editorial and business sides of a publishing company coming together at the same desk, and it’s even more rare to have that coming together with the licensing and corporate stuff that I did. So probably, we’ll get a little more normal in some of those structures over time, and divvy it up a little more.
To read the whole interview, go <a href="http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=12&t=000125">HERE</a>!